


quis fallere possit amantem?

by historynut101



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Break Up, F/F, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Implied/Referenced Suicide, I’m sorry but I had Thoughts about their dependency, Kidnapping!, Like, Love, M/M, Murder, Temporary Character Death, almost forgot about that, and also the aeneid is an evil text, andy and quynh's relationship is mostly mentioned, but also fluff?, but it works out!, but it’s like two thousand years old so catch up people, but still there, definitely hurt/comfort, lots of latin once again, so yay for history?, spoiler warning for the aeneid?, there’s separation in this my dudes, this fic is like the aeneid but make it nicky and joe, this fic ranges from like the 1450s to the early 1500s, very earnest attempt at historical accuracy here, with a lot of skipping around during those years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:53:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25939972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historynut101/pseuds/historynut101
Summary: Somewhere along the long journey, Yusuf had found a copy of the Aeneid. When they sit on bleached sand, resting their bones from travel and war and the perils of never aging, Yusuf pulls it from his bag and presses it into Nicoló’s palms.Nicoló stares at it; he hasn't held a copy since he was young and in grammar school, tracing the words and worlds in his mind. He had whispered some of his favorites in his lover's ear when they were pressed tightly together over the years, decades sewn together by images of a Trojan’s wanderings and a Latin princess’ war torn country.Then, Nicoló looks into Yusuf’s eyes, his own tongue bursting with thought but struck silent by the surety of love he feels rising in his skin. When he meets dark eyes, he sees a hint of trepidation and question, the sight of uncertainty thickening Nicoló’s blood to a roar. He catches Yusuf's chin and pulls it forward so he can whisper in his ear, “Amore sum viro mirabili.”(Basically: what if Nicoló liked the Aeneid?)
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova & Quynh | Noriko, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 41
Kudos: 142





	quis fallere possit amantem?

Immortality is not what Nicoló thought it would be. 

As a boy, he thought that the only immortals were epic heroes born of a god’s blood, but when he was reborn on a battlefield next to a Muslim man with dark eyes and a gleaming blade, he knew that nothing would ever be as he imagined again.

Now, some three hundred years after his first death from Yusuf’s unforgiving scimitar and the first stirrings of furious love that mutual death had lit in them both, Nicoló thinks he has been proven right. One reason for this is the new companions they have picked up along the way, the warrior women that had blazed through their dreams for decades. 

Quynh appeared before them as beauty made porcelain, cheekbones high and fingers strong. The first thing that strikes Nicoló when they meet, surrounded by dead Mongolians who had tried to burn down a poor Nizari Isma’ili town, is how she holds a sword with knowledge that is surely a thousand years too old for her young face. Later, he learns that she drinks like a fish and loves to play music almost as much as she loves the pull of a bowstring against her cheek.

Andrea (“Andromache the Scythian,” she said in smooth and somehow old Arabic as she stood covered in blood, red and thick, "but you can call me Andrea." Her mouth split into a feral grin and Nicoló knew he would like her) is a complicated woman. Nicoló learned this early on in their travels together. She carried within her the spike of loneliness, but she was tempered by the presence of Quynh at her elbow and the rush of battle that they always seemed to find.

They are immortal and perplexing and graceful and brilliant and _old_. He calls to mind the women of the old stories, Proserpina and Artemis and Iphigenia and Juno and Penelope and Helen, but none of the monikers ever seem to fit, for Andrea and Quynh are too great even for myth. But, when Nicoló mentions Homer’s tale of Trojan Andromache and her desecrated husband and murdered baby, Andrea’s eyes grow hard and her muscles tighten against some unseen enemy, her expression harrowed and deadly until Quynh lifts a hand to trail down her spine, soothing and sympathetic. He does not bring it up again and buries any thought of the _Iliad_ deep within himself.

He and Yusuf wander the world with these women, sand and grass and rock worn underfoot as they sometimes die only to live again each time.

It is a life he never would have expected, but it is one he pulls close to his heart, for it is full of magic and love and mystery. Sometimes, when Yusuf sketches Nicoló in the wan light of the moon or Nicoló’s lips press against soft and salty skin, the full vastness of their irrational, deathless love rushes through him and he thinks, _iam, nos omnes et magis sumus_ , _now, we are all and more_.

For all its trials, _immortalitas_ has given them a thousand gifts.

….

There are many missions, usually tips about nefarious plots or impending doom that is whispered in the immortals’ ears. They follow the current of each lead, rooting out spineless snakes of this world so that humanity becomes just a little less cruel.

This is how they come to traverse the road from Tripoli to Tunis, taking them through the land of ancient _Carthago_. As a boy, Nicoló dreamed of the great Carthage, his mind spinning schoolboy tales of Hannibal’s gleaming Punic troops and Queen Dido’s cascading blond locks. Now, he is embraced by a land better than his dreams, for it is the place of Yusuf’s birth. 

He is introduced to myrtle not as the spears of Polydorus, bloody and cursed, but as the scent of his love’s childhood. He picks hawthorn alongside Yusuf and revels in the berries’ tangy flavour while his love saves the seeds (when Nicoló asks why, Yusuf smiles in that sly way of his and says, “ _Sunt toxica, amans mi._ They are poison, my love.” Nicoló’s eyes widen and he chokes on the berry he had just swallowed; his love just laughs and laughs). They slumber beneath olive trees, the twisting branches full of shade and a deathless god’s touch. Yusuf is more relaxed than he has been in years, enjoying the parts of his home he can share, even if his family is gone and the cities have grown new neighborhoods. 

On this night, they have made camp in a dark grove, the fire lengthening the shadows between the trees, making it seem as if the whole wood is shivering. The feeling cocoons the immortals, sharpening their camaraderie into a layer of silence. Each of them takes the time to think; Andrea watches Quynh carve at her arrow fletchings, the look charged with love and companionship. Yusuf hovers near Nicoló, who has pulled out his old wooden cross. He worries at the wood with the pads of his thumbs, the question of religion barreling through his head as it sometimes does.

Eventually Yusuf leaves him to his contemplation, a kiss placed against the side of Nicoló’s head before he wanders over to stir the stew bubbling over the flame.

Andrea slides her eyes over Nicoló’s fingers when he presses them together in prayer, his body held loose as he negotiates his place with God one hushed word at a time. When he finishes, she wears a weary face and says, “I used to be a goddess, you know. Of war.”

Yusuf stills his hands over the fire and glances up at her, his dark gaze unreadable to all but Nicoló, who knows that he is fighting the slight judgment that the whisper of blasphemy still invokes within him. Then, his love’s eyes regain their sparkle, a faint amusement dancing in them, and he moves his gaze to stare into Nicoló’s eyes, “If I saw someone full of never-ending life, I might also worship them.”

Quynh huffs a sardonic laugh at the shameless flirt, her fingers plucking at her bowstring like a harp. Andrea shakes her head, the tense memory of long life easing out of her like water. Yusuf reaches a hand out, fire and stew forgotten, to cup Nicoló’s cheek. For his part, Nicoló watches his love, enraptured and caught by destiny.

Later, the band of immortals eat their stew on plates of bread. It is then that Nicoló knows fate has granted him these people to cherish, their meeting foretold and their purpose assured. He also knows, as Quynh and Andrea retreat to their tent, their hands held so preciously together, and Yusuf stares up at the stars beside him, his lips telling stories for a thousand and one nights, that he must fight to keep them.

….

The immortals do not always stay together; occasionally they will veer off, directions or paths or conflict leading them to new shores. So while Nicoló may relish in the family he’s found, he also recognizes that they each follow the gleam of rage that draws them in most, tempted by destruction that they can turn towards goodness.

Thus, Andrea and Quynh leave not long after Tunis to wade into the never ending conflicts across the Steppe, whispers of Khanates and rebellions thick in their ears. Nicoló and Yusuf content themselves with the lingering chaos of Europe, the tides of conflict along the Mediterranean alone enough to keep them busy.

Italy’s city-states are daily cataclysms just as France and England try to rip each other to shreds, new inroads made every moment and new saints burned every decade. They save who they can, when they can, secreting from city to country to culture, knitting together something from the nothingness of bloody massacre. 

Nicoló finds himself content in the life they lead, wayward and nomadic though it might be, because every step he takes is one that Yusuf does as well. The chaos around them touches them but never leaves a mark, so the endless _certamen_ , battle, that this land sings with merely rolls off their skin.

But sometimes, word of some invasion or skirmish or other pointless bloodshed gives them pause. When they hear in the square of Corinth from the town crier that Constantinople has fallen to the Ottomans by way of treachery and gunpowder, both Nicoló and Yusuf stop to realize that this is a moment that will break the world around them. 

This is the moment they realize that the Crusades they fought in are truly a thing of the past. This is when Nicoló turns to Yusuf and blinks, his body held somewhere between grief and self hate and relief, the torrent of feeling making him a stranger even to himself. This is when Yusuf drags him to an alleyway, safe from prying eyes, so he can press their foreheads together and remind them both to breathe.

But they walk away from the news, as they always do, unmoored by time and tied only to each other.

....

After Corinth, they leave the Christian world to mourn Constantinople’s loss and wander through the countryside along the bend of the Mediterranean, making it all the way from Grecian marble to the curved bay of Savoy Nice, its sand whitewashed and sea air cool.

Somewhere along the long journey, Yusuf had found a copy of the _Aeneid._ When they sit on bleached sand, resting their bones from travel and war and the perils of never aging (and while Nicoló’s heart beats in his throat from being so close to Genoa, blood rushing at the memory of his sister and father and orchard even when he knows it’s all dead and gone; his home haunts him in a way Yusuf’s does not), Yusuf pulls it from his bag and presses it into Nicoló’s palms.

Nicoló stares at it; he hasn't held a copy since he was young and in grammar school, tracing the words and worlds in his mind. He had whispered some of his favorites in his lover's ear when they were pressed tightly together over the years, decades sewn together by images of a Trojan’s wanderings and a Latin princess’ war torn country. 

His fingers catch on the thick sheets of the manuscript. This one is old, old enough that the pages crinkle and the ink warps, but it also feels younger than Nicoló is now. Strange, how this is their life, filled with only the companionship of each other and faded works of art and masonry and poetry. The work is exquisite; some monk had likely labored over it for years, illuminating its edges and crafting its intricacies. 

Then, Nicoló looks into Yusuf’s eyes, his own tongue bursting with thought but struck silent by the surety of love he feels rising in his skin. When he meets dark eyes, he sees a hint of trepidation and question, the sight of uncertainty thickening Nicoló’s blood to a roar. He catches Yusuf's chin and pulls it forward so he can whisper in his ear, “ _Amore sum viro mirabili_.”

He feels rather than sees Yusuf's smile as he moves his mouth to finally meet rosy lips, the inch separating them a travesty the gods themselves must fear. There, in the heady embrace of love and want and need, he says it again and again, “I am in love with a wonderful man.”

With only the waves and the constellations as witnesses, their ends blur together.

In the distance, dark green eyes watch, stormy with disgust.

....

They rent an inn for the night, the room dingy and drafty, but a bed is bliss after their weeks on the road, so they strip the sand off their skin gleefully and roam their fingers with curiosity that never dies. They groom, because they have had so little chance to. 

Nicoló washes his love’s hair in the bucket they’ve been given, fingers catching on the curls just as the waxing light does, the rough feel as close to home as anything he’s ever found. Weeks worth of dirt, dried blood, and other fluid streak down tan skin and Nicoló’s heart aches, just a little.

After, Yusuf takes shears to Nicoló’s hair, shortening it from chin length to just above the ear. Yusuf twists his fingers through the strands, pleased by their new soft fluff.

His love moves to Nicoló’s skin next, touch deep and questioning. He sweeps black lines across white skin, a pattern of henna forming that collides stars and flowers and spears (he must have bought the powder in a market when Nicoló wasn’t looking, the tender bastard). Nicoló is a willing canvas, caught quiet by fascination and seized by love. Yusuf draws and draws until there is little unmarked and the sun has faded to a collision of rugged orange and silky pink. Nicoló thinks, _hic et hic et hic, semper._

Figures move below them, cloaks in the coming night and daggers in hidden hands, _this and this and this, always._

The door to their dim room bursts open just as Yusuf finishes the henna pattern and reaches for Nicoló’s cheek. The two immortals jolt apart and move to their weapons, but they are just not quick enough.

Nicoló sees a dagger slice apart his love’s neck and shouts. He does not feel the blow to the back of his own head.

....

When he wakes, the world is still as dim as their room at the inn.

Before, he was surrounded by the scent of henna and Yusuf. This time, he smells rotting wood and burning paraffin, his face smashed against a floor full of splinters. He opens his eyes and sees Yusuf sitting across from him, head tilted back and front soaked in blood, but his chest rises with breath, so Nicoló allows himself to sigh in relief. However, the motion alerts him to the bindings around his hands and feet; he sees Yusuf’s limbs tied up the same way. He huffs scornfully. Like the wary Laocoon and his sons, they are bound, but with ropes instead of snakes. How ironic.

He sweeps his eyes around them, head lifting up to crane his neck, and realizes that they are surrounded by men who look as if they enjoy too much drink and not enough rationality. They trade grunts over tankards full of thick dark liquid. One, a blond with dark green eyes, flicks his fingers through a candle’s flame. Suddenly, the blond looks up, and catches Nicoló’s quiet gaze.

“Ah, so you are awake,” the man says in Occitan that Nicoló barely knows. He stands and moves so the tip of his boot touches Nicoló’s cheek.

Nicoló stares up at him, eyes bright and unyielding, his very soul itching to bathe this man in the full force of his cold fury, but the ropes are tight against his skin and he knows this is not the moment to strike. So he stares, daring this blond man to breathe another word.

The man smirks and leans down, his face alight with the glee of a secret known and begging to be used, “We saw the two of you.”

Nicoló’s blood turns to ice. 

“We don’t know what you are,” the man glances over his shoulder at Yusuf, who has now blinked awake, his brow furrowed in anger, “but consorting with a man, a Muslim shit no less, is a sin that surely brings you in consort with the devil as well.”

With that, the blond man’s hand shoots out, seizing the newly cropped hair of Nicoló’s head. He shoves it at the ground hard enough for Nicoló to dream a thousand new constellations. 

He hears shuffling as his head rings, then, a harsh cry of, “Move and I’ll run you through like the dog you are, Saracen scum.”

The blond man now presses a dagger to Nicoló’s collarbone, the tip sharp and metal cool. There is more shuffling as Yusuf bellows in old Zeneize, “Nicoló, no! Get away!”

Nicoló scrambles from the knife, desperate to reach his love, “Yusuf, you mustn’t-”

He halts his call when he hears the sound of a sword puckering through flesh and sees through a tangle of limbs Yusuf twitch from a hole in his gut. He stares into the faces of their captors, burning, bleeding, ringing with rage. 

“ _Ede faecem,_ ” he spits in a strangled voice, “Eat shit.”

The men laugh in ugly voices and the candles along the walls quiver, as if shuddering from the violence and delight.

The blond man brings his boot down on Nicoló’s hand hard enough to shatter bone through skin and says, “We will kill you, no matter how many times it takes.”

....

The pain doesn’t end; they die over and over, a myriad of brutality that appears to tire even their torturers.

Through the haze of anguish, Vergil comes to him, ‘ _O miseri, quae tanta insania._ ’

Nicoló’s jaw slips back into place after a mace’s kiss and he hears Yusuf hoarsely scream in Arabic beside him, a mess of curses and Nicoló’s name and calls to God. The world narrows to these echoes of Yusuf’s existence that Nicoló can catch, _‘Oh miserable ones, what great madness.’_

He himself cries against the tide of agony, “Yusuf, Yusuf, please.”

The henna that was so lovingly crafted on his skin is wiped away by blood and shit and sweat and misery.

He fears they will be caught by these snakes forever, strangled in never ending death.

….

He dies. 

He sleeps. 

He wakes. 

He lives. 

He screams for Yusuf.

There’s a dagger dragging low across his belly, then an axe clipping his fingers, then a boot mashing his windpipe, then a fire poker burning through his chest. It all blurs together, a sick melody of torment that pulls his heart to pieces and loosens his mind from its earthly bounds. 

The world swims in and out of itself; in one moment, he finds himself wrapped in his crusading mail and the cherry bloom of his blood and that of the demon he has found, stomach empty as he kneels to pray to God for his sins, “ _Gratias agamus, Domine, clementia ille tua_ \- We thank thee, Lord, that in thy mercy-”

The demon's boot rattles against his helmet, “Ha!”

Nicoló falls to the side, but rises again, sword in hand and gore tracing his deadly grimace (long after, nestled under a pockmarked blanket of stars and the sweet embrace of shared skin, the two had laughed for ages about the moment, sickly funny as it was). 

The next moment, he tastes copper in his mouth and feels something wet and heavy thud against his torso.

Then, the voice of a demon, no _coniunx_ , lover, presses at the edges of his fractured mind, “ _Nicoló, suscita! Nunc!_ ”

Fingers, rough from a scimitar’s grip, trace his eyebrow with an urgent press, “Nicoló, wake up! Now!”

He leaves behind the dream of praying to a bloody God so he can awaken to a scene of ferocity. His limbs flex, freed from their restraints and singing with the need to exact revenge. Nicoló looks for a target in the candle lit room, copper and paraffin scents only fueling his ardor. 

Next to his stomach, a dismembered arm twitches, the sight raising bile. He casts his eyes about wildly. To his right, there is a mess of dead and dying Nicean men, their tunics ripped and stained with fluids whose origins are untold. To his left, Yusuf is roaring with life, his rage a firebrand as he pummels one of their captors, a pot-bellied man, with a chamberpot. There is a cluster of filthy men still alive, scrambling for weapons in the corner. Among them, the dark green eyed leader.

Nicoló’s eyes narrow.

He picks up the scabbard laying by a dead man missing half his head, dura mater glistening under the moon’s kiss. He slowly rises and pulls the sword out, his whole being thrumming, lurching, seething. Nicoló stalks the man with heavy steps; sandy blond hair flutters as the man starts shaking his head, pleas spilling forth, Occitan sweeping through the room like a bewitched wind, but it all falters when sword meets throat, the man killed on his knees, begging for mercy. 

He turns to Yusuf and their eyes meet for the first time in an eternity. A whole world is caught there, an epic tale waiting to be written, a thousand lines of poetry waiting to be inscribed. Nicoló wishes he could stop and whisper psalms of loving worship in Yusuf’s ear, but there is no time. There is madness to make right, injustice to rectify, fate to set in motion. They will douse the fire in their hearts later, when the deed is done.

In tandem, their eyes harden, shoulders tighten, and bodies move to face the last of their tormentors. The two immortals find them snivelling and cowering in the corner, their hands outstretched for some kind of understanding. Nicoló knows they will find none; for their crimes, Yusuf and Nicoló will teach them the sting of death that the two have come to know so well.

After the deed is done and they stand wrapped in the aftermath of agony, Yusuf and Nicoló tilt their heads against each other, breath and warmth reassuring them of life. Amidst the waning horror, Nicoló says tenderly, “ _Numera benedictiones_.”

Yusuf chuckles wetly and grips Nicoló’s bicep tightly, vessels bursting at the firmness of the motion. He tugs the both of them away from the slaughter and out into the night that knows nothing of sin or prejudice, its pockmarked stars blissfully silent. 

As they begin their escape through cobbled streets, Yusuf parodies Nicoló’s words back to him, “Yes, my love, count your blessings.”

Nicoló’s mouth quirks slightly and he prepares to recount his love as his true blessing, “Yusuf, I-”

Tanned palms quiver suddenly and Yusuf untwists his hand from where it had been clasped with Nicoló’s hard enough to splinter bone, “ _Nolite, Nicoló._ Don’t, Nicoló.”

Wind whips through Nicoló’s bloodsoaked short hair and brushes against skin marred by smeared henna. His ribcage’s sudden heaviness slows him so he trails just behind Yusuf. He stares at broad shoulders and sweat damp curls, the sight halfway between anguish and reality. 

But, there are demons at their heels, so he and his _coniunx_ must hurry. Nicoló reminds himself that there will be time to heal their hearts. 

….

They flee to Sorrento, lured by its high, defendable gorges and sour limoncello.

They relax into a life amongst steep cliffs. Nicoló works as a scribe for a merchant, his hands stained and sore from calculations that last well into the night. Yusuf finds work on the docks, the port quiet but always looking for the work of strongmen; on the side, he draws charcoal pictures for visitors from further inland (all except those who speak Occitan, those he refuses and then wanders home, eyes withdrawn and palms shaking).

It is a good life; they try not to touch memories of snakes and ropes and death, but Nice sits uncomfortably between them, the event its own high gorge that Nicoló fears traversing. 

One day, the tension pulling between them snaps as they take a bath together amidst the twilight. 

“I think I should change my name,” Yusuf mumbles in Arabic as their limbs steep in the bath.

Nicoló ceases his fingers’ exploration of his love’s ear to frown, “Why would you want to do that?”

Yusuf says nothing, just fidgets his feet along the cloth lined floor of the wooden bath and chews the inside of his cheek.

Nicoló feels the old familiar burst of affection in his chest at the sight of such nervous ticks, but he swallows the feeling so he can tug on Yusuf’s earlobe insistently, “ _Amans mi, cur?_ ”

His love drags his body out of the bath all of a sudden, forsaking Nicoló’s warm embrace for the cold of the night air. Yusuf wraps a linen around his middle and Nicoló sits in the bath still, confused and aching for more touch. Then, he catches the edge of his lover’s dark eyes; they are a maelstrom of fear, rage, and exhaustion _._ The look pulls Nicoló out of the bath and into Yusuf’s space, his own wet skin cooling as he tries to catch his love’s gaze. He repeats himself, “My love, why?”

Finally, their eyes meet and just like always, the world halts its breath between them. Words rise, “I think that it would be easier, _habibi_. It is hard to hear it pass between your lips, now.”

Nicoló had known this was coming after their narrow escape in Nice (he had known every since they laid strangled on a rotting wood floor, Nicoló’s lips gasping Yusuf’s name again and again as they descended to the underworld a thousand times over), but still the weight of it pressed on his chest. His mind screamed, _Yusuf, Yusuf, Yusuf_. He had sworn once that this name would encase his life; that Yusuf would be held deeper in Nicoló’s heart than any other word, that God and Christ and church were overshadowed by the enormity of those two syllables. It was the closest he had ever come to making a wedding vow to Yusuf (Nicoló isn’t sure they’ll ever have real ones, or if it even matters; God sees them as they are already, brought them together on a cursed battlefield, why do they need more approval than that?). This word, this name, this man, are as much part of Nicoló as the blood in his veins and the immortality in his body.

But.

It is not the name of Yusuf that so claims Nicoló, it is Yusuf himself, with his dark eyes and limitless romanticism and cheeky grins. It is love that binds them, not letters or syllables. They are beyond reason, beyond thinking, beyond death itself. To confine them to a word is folly. They are all and more. Yusuf is all and more.

So Nicoló holds his hand up to trace his lover’s cheek, ever so softly, and asks, “What were you thinking?”

In an instant, dark eyes overflow with relief and knowledge and acceptance. A sad yet beautiful smile spreads across his bearded face and his lips open just a little to whisper, “Josef.”

 _Huh. Josef,_ Nicoló thinks as his green grey eyes drown in dark irises, _it fits him too._

When their lips meet, Nicoló tastes the fading crispness of lemons on his love’s tongue. The flavor is brightly sour, reassuring in its sharpness. He feels awake, brought to life by their love and the sense that the throbbing memory of Nice was healing just a little.

But that night, his _coniunx_ , lies awake, gaze lingering on the wood beams above them, his face filled with that same vicious exhaustion that had lurked in his eyes before. Nicoló tries to sleep beside him, but his ribcage is thrumming and his heartbeat is unrelenting in its nervous staccato.

He knows that something dark is coming, but he is helpless to halt the onslaught.

….

Then, one day, Josef comes in from the docks, his dark eyes a storm. His lips part the second he passes the threshold, “I heard something in the market today.”

Nicoló inclines his head softly from where he sits with his day’s calculations, a bowl of mushroom stew steaming next to him as his quill flits from addition to subtraction to division. He hums, half-interested in the idle gossip that is sure to follow, “Oh?”

Josef mutters darkly as he closes the door, “Castile and Aragon have besieged Málaga. If it falls, so will the entire Emirate of Granada. There will be no more Muslims in Spain.”

Nicoló reclines in his chair at the dinner table, mathematics forgotten as his heart settles uncomfortably in his chest and his throat itches, “Josef, you don’t know that, Granada could survive.“

Josef snorts with the all-consuming weight of a dozen witnessed Crusades and says, “How, when all of Spain stands against them with Ferdinand and Isabella at the head? No, the _taifa_ will fall.”

With that, his love trudges heavily over to their shared dresser and pulls out a cloth to wipe his face, his temples gleaming with sweat.

Nicoló watches the movement, his body held on a knife's edge, “Whatever will happen, it is a war over God and we swore we would never touch that again.”

Josef shoves at the wooden drawer, his temper spiking fiercely, “The Spaniards are winning, _habibi!_ They have tried so long to destroy the Emirate, so that they could take back their precious peninsula and it is wrong, but they are winning! Ferdinand and Isabella will burn it all and laugh at the smoke.”

His love turns to hold onto the table, his face a torrent of destruction, his eyes boring holes through a bowl of forgotten stew. Nicoló aches to reach out, but fearing Josef's temper's lash, instead speaks quietly, his bones weary, “And the Ottomans brought Constaninople to its knees. Some of the defenders were Genoan, my people. The story ended the way it always does; thousands dead or enslaved so rich men may rise. The same as it was for the Crusaders in Antioch, in Tyre, in Jerusalem. All of it is wrong. All of them use God to raze the world. I will not be the one to light the flame again.”

Josef grips the table even more tightly, splintering the wood with his firm artist’s hands, “I am not so sure anymore, Nicoló. We agreed not to take sides, but what is happening in Spain feels different.”

“How so? All I see is the same blood, the same reasons, the same lies, this time only from new mouths. I won’t raise my sword in the name of God again, Josef,” Nicoló clasps his ink stained fingers together as if in prayer, the memory of Jerusalem’s wholesale slaughter ripping through his head at even the mention of doing such a thing again.

His love speaks with a hoarse voice, scratchy from emotion and strangled by a facade of calm, “The last _taifa_ is holding on by a whisper and what am I supposed to do, let it all crumble? Let a culture blooming with knowledge and light be stomped underfoot? Let my people be treated as something- something other?” 

Josef catches Nicoló’s gaze with eyes that bear every moment of their hundreds of years, “You can’t even call me by my true name anymore, Nicoló. I do not belong.”

Nicoló huffs a defeated breath so sharply that the candle set on the table trembles, “Yusuf, Josef, they are both you, I would call you by either if you asked, whatever the consequence. No matter what your name, I would never ask you to abandon your people, but we agreed to leave the Crusades behind, to let it all fall as it may.”

“ _Non satis est,_ ” his dark eyed lover’s shoulders tighten as he grasps the wooden table, “That is not enough.”

Nicoló feels his fingers twist tighter around themselves; he looks up desperately, “Why not?”

“Because then I would be a traitor.”

“Yusuf-”

Suddenly, his love turns and yanks his cloak from its peg, hauls his scimitar from its perch by the door, and turns his blazing eyes to Nicoló to spit out, “You do not understand, Crusader. I must do this. I cannot abandon them. The Christians will burn Granada. They have done it before.”

With that, he hauls open the door and stalks away into the night, shoulders broad and hate rolling in waves.

The hinges creak as the wind sweeps in, blowing out the candle and casting Nicoló in darkness. He does not light it again.

….

After a few days, Nicoló realizes that Josef is not coming back. Moments after he accepts this, he throws himself off the jagged cliffs of Sorrento and rides the tide of the wine dark sea until salt and blood is all he can taste.

Then, he drags himself from the depths and puts a dagger to his neck.

Then, he picks a fight with a drunk and takes a broken bottle to the brain.

Then, he pushes his sword through his heart (he does this a few times, just to feel something there).

Then, he lays in the sun outside the city for weeks, mouth parched and eyes bursting. 

Then, he stands in front of a carriage wheel.

Then, he walks into a firepit.

Then.

Then.

Then.

....

He moves on. 

He is a man with no name. He hates the taste of lemons. He hates the sun’s kiss. He hates the way it feels to walk alone. He hates his short hair. He hates how cold it is at night. He hates how much he wants to drown in blood and never breathe again. 

He is sick at heart, every moment of the last hundreds of years weighing on his shoulders. He crunches yellow leaves underfoot as the seasons change and the world dulls. He thinks of finding Andrea and Quynh, but he does not want their sympathy. He does not want anything. He wonders if he will become like Andrea when she spends too long away from Quynh, filled with a look too old for his body and his features misshapen from loneliness. He could not bear to see the woman’s bone deep sympathy.

He leaves Italy.

He does not go of his own will; he lays on the beachhead until his skin starts to peel from the burn of the sun, waiting for Josef to stride in from the surf, teeth bright and gaze soft as sea foam. Instead, he is a twisted facsimile of Aeneas called from Carthage to abandon his love and ruin all to follow his destiny. He, a Crusader yet not, seeks nothing, no destiny to moor him and no love to revive him. He wonders how Aeneas could ever have forsaken Dido's all and more; the thought swallows him like a city in flames. But he jolts from his half-musings and rises from the _arena_ , the sand, to seek some less painful _litora_ , shores.

He meets a Nicean thug on the road to nowhere and hacks at the man’s pathetic body until he is nothing but bits. He walks until the land turns from grass to rock to sand. He lays under the stars and wishes he could rip the constellations from their perch above.

He tries to burn the _Aeneid_ Josef gave him (he can’t bring himself to, he loves the sweeping curves of its letters and the faint aura of his once _coniunx_ that still clings to it).

He fears that he has become like the cursed queen Dido; destined to live and unable to die, thus trapped in agony forever. He thinks of the blonde haired _regina_ and her furious self that pushed against fate and life and remembers the burning passion of Josef in battle. 

He wonders if Iris will come on saffron wings to take him from this hell just as she came to a Dido drenched in love and blood.

He lives, he dies, he lives again, he thinks, _Iris, me solve_.

_Iris, free me._

....

He doesn’t know if he was wrong. 

He finds himself in Krak des Chevaliers, a stronghold he once visited when his immortality was still young and he barely knew Yusuf. Then, it had been gleaming and white, screaming the majesty of its Hospitaller inhabitants with every imposing stone, every flickering torchlight, every ominous turret. 

After a visit to the tavern full of stale wine and good merriment, the two immortals had killed some Templars who had run amok and cut the fingers off some Muslim boys; Nicoló had turned to his _consors_ (they were only companions then, their love too nascent to know) and nodded with surety before lifting his sword in tandem with a scimitar. His old guilt from Crusading had caught in his throat and stayed, even when Yusuf turned from sending the Muslim boys back to their mothers and met Nicoló’s eyes with an approving half smile.

He wanders the battlements, now held by the Mamluks and the guilt rises, pulls at him, threatens to drag him to the underworld. There is no Josef to reassure him now, because he has gone back to war, to the fight, to the Crusades. He was too scared to go back, too frightened of his own past. He was a coward.

But he still doesn’t know if he was wrong.

He walks under the moon’s watchful shine and contemplates throwing himself from one of the grand turrets. Then, a scream pierces the air; a woman’s, high and reedy and full of blistering terror. His head whips around and his boots hit the pavement before he has even stopped to think. He turns down an alleyway and sees a dark figure leaning over a woman in a _niqaab_ who pushes at him, eyes wild through the fabric, legs kicking furiously. He takes in the sight and feels his blood sing with a purpose he thought he had forgotten.

So he draws his sword and marches forward, teeth gritted and purpose renewed. When he brings the blade to the puny man’s throat, he knows that he will no longer be a coward. 

After, he reaches out a hand for the trembling girl and nods his head, deep and low, to show her respect she sorely deserves; with the motion, he knows he will fight, even with no name and no life and no sun to see by.

….

His wandering becomes less aimless and more purposeful after Krak des Chevaliers’ white walls. He follows the same paths he and Josef walked when their immortality was new and the Crusades still raged through the Levant. 

He passes Arqa and saves a drunkard from drowning in a horse’s trough while fighting flashbacks of tunics with white crosses and spears arching through the air. He makes pilgrimage to Jerusalem and has to grip the wall against the tide of bile rising in him, memories of smoking corpses and bloody fountains rushing up to meet him; that night, he slices the guts of an English merchant who had pressed a dagger to a Jewish boy’s throat. He wanders into Damascus, haunted by the ghosts of Baldwin and Mawdud, every corner full of assassins and failed invasion; outside the walls, where Timur once stacked skulls, he meets a robber’s axe with his sword to defend a caravan of refugees fleeing the newly christened Ottoman Empire. 

He is surrounded by death, by life, by memory. But still, he is alone. Josef is not there. The man who was to be his destiny is gone. His love walks a different battlefield, sees a different path, and however much he wishes he could follow and fight and protect, he cannot shake the feeling that it is not _right_ , not even for Josef.

All these wars do is make strangers of its own people, like the refugees who had wandered, feet bleeding and pockets empty, to Damascus. Like the Crusaders who had listened to God’s call and left their homes to fight unholy wars. Like Granada and Castile and Genoa and Tunis and Antioch and Jerusalem and Constantinople and Aragon, dozens of cities and thousands of faces that bathe themselves in the pure righteousness of Allah and God to make glorious the hell they create. 

He wonders if his destiny is to always hold his sword in God’s name; perhaps that is why Josef left him, so he could realize what he truly is, a Crusader still and a stranger forever. The thought rummages through his mind as he moves from city to city, memory to memory, forgotten crusade to ever new conflict. 

One day at dusk, he lays beneath an olive tree, the branches as deathless as ever. He hears an echo and turns his head, his mind looking for something that isn’t there (he’s looking for Josef; he always looks. He follows men with curls like his through marketplaces and tunes his ears to any hint of voice with a timber like his as he sits in dank taverns. He is always disappointed, but something in his ribcage tugs at the thought of stopping). His eyes dance along the lengthening shadows of the grove, his fingers itching to reach out and take a hand that isn’t there.

He lowers his gaze from the twists of the fruiting olives to the _Aeneid_ which has slipped out of his bag, the edges peaking out as if drawing him in.

He lifts it out carefully, reverentially, a memento of a time he has nearly forgotten and a bliss he will surely never meet again. His fingers drag along the worn binding, embossed in faded gold with threading coming away at the seams. He remembers, suddenly, his father opening up their copy of the epic before he sent him away to study under his uncle as a priest. His mother had whispered in his ear that if one wanted, they could ask for the _Sortes Vergilianae_ , the Lots of Vergil, and know the universe’s will for them. All you had to do was close your eyes and prick your finger with the words of the poet. 

Twilight suspends the world as he holds the epic tightly in his grasp. His breath comes fast as he drowns in memory, overcome by the scent of myrtle and the sharp sting of loneliness that grips the back of his neck and the never-ending pull of his heart for one that beats a lifetime away. 

He closes his eyes.

He opens the book.

He will know what God wants from him.

He will pull at Vergil's lots. He will pull at destiny.

He brings his finger down, the whisper of paper shifting underneath it shattering the silence that had whistled into the grove.

When he opens green grey eyes, he is greeted by a line wrapped in royal blue and deep red and stark black. It comes in the middle of a passage about warriors in love and battlefields draped in eternity, the touch of something so close to himself and Josef pulling at his chest and pricking at his vocal cords like fingers on a harp. His voice rises, worn by lack of use, and he speaks the line from Nisus to his lover Euryalus aloud amidst the agony ripping through his veins and the heartbreak sending his soul into the ether, “‘ _Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt, Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?'"_

The world narrows to the scrape of the olive tree’s bark against his back and the illuminated manuscript glowing in front of his eyes. 

“‘Do the gods put this fire in our minds, Euryalus, or does each man's mad desire become his own god?’”

To fight for God is madness of their own making. It tore apart his love and cast his world asunder, it strangled them under the hateful gaze of dark green eyes, it took their names from them and pulled at their edges until they came undone at the seams, lost in a storm of pain and discord that shipwrecked them on different shores. He wants to swim back across, to shout, to scream, to let Josef know they were both right and both wrong. They do not fight for God and the torrent of desire, they fight for each other and they fight for the world, for the helpless who cannot raise arms and the set upon who can find no way out. 

He knows, he knows, he knows now, he understands. He pulled at destiny and in its threads he found the truth, but when he lifts his head to look for Josef to share, there is no one there.

Wind sways through deathless branches and hot tears mar the surface of the manuscript. The twilight fades and he sits alone with the constellations.

….

He is in a dusty little village trying to pick up goods and retain the feeling of Arabic in his mind. He listens to its swirls and dives, a language that catches the hushed murmur of the earth and makes it real. He blends into the words and into the crowd, his hood pulled over his white skin and green grey eyes. 

On this day, the market is alight with conversation, shoppers flitting around like bees seeking pollen, mouths constructing fast-flying rumors instead of honeycomb walls. He wonders why they are all so harried as he silently purchases bread and a few figs (all while pointedly ignoring the lemons and hawthorn placed in the center of the stall). Then, his curiosity is fulfilled when an old woman passes by and titters in twirling Arabic, "I cannot believe Granada is gone."

The world is suspended in the light of midday, still and dull as Nicoló’s mind twists. He rushes into an alleyway, his forehead arching towards the warmth of another’s, his fingers itching to wrap around another’s, his skin searching for the reassuring brush of another’s.

But there is no one. Despite the sun’s brutal gaze, he is cold as ice.

Words continue to spin around him, the world subsumed in the knowledge that though the war may be over, Josef is not here. He may never be again.

Before he drowns in the onslaught, he steps out into the market once again, his shoulders marred by a henna pattern of stars and flowers and spears that no one sees but him. He carries the imprint through the streets and into the sand, his skin all ablaze. 

As he lets the shifting _arena_ swallow him, he realizes he has never felt more alone.

That night, he dreams of Josef as he used to, the texture of his once love’s a heady mixture of dark eyes and collapsing breath. He starts awake, half buried in the sand, the night unrelenting as the shadows of the desert stare at him. He drags a palm down his face and tries to swallow the pain before it tears at his throat, before it makes him wail aloud the madness of his grief and regret.

Instead of losing himself to the tide of agony, he rises and walks to the west, hoping for some kind of land to call his own, some home to snatch away from this loneliness, some purpose to illuminate this destiny he still carries.

He does not hope for love; not ever again. That lives with Josef, now and always.

….

He makes his way through sand and story back to Tunis, _Carthago_ calling him back like he will find a mural of his life painted upon its walls. The fields are absent salt but full of myrtle, spears peaking through the gloam that mark him with memories of a love gone by and a grove long forgotten. 

He wanders, as always, until he comes upon a gang of sweat slicked men threatening a spice merchant, turmeric spilled at their feet as they divest an old man of his livelihood. 

He comes at them from behind as they try to escape, their feet slapping against cobblestone under a brutal sun. He catches one robber in the back, his sword puncturing flesh. The man falls to his knees, a veritable cavalcade of Aleppo peppers, cilantro, and mace spilling from his arms. The other men slow at the death rattle of their companion, but when they catch sight of a glinting sword and stormy eyes, they flee faster, spices swirling into the wind at their rush.

His eyes sting from the onslaught of powder and tang, but he presses on, chasing the gang to a beachhead so they are cornered between the sea foam and an unforgiving blade. When they realize their mistake, he half expects them to throw down their pilfered stores and wade into the tide, but they rally instead, scimitars and daggers pulled from worn leather belts. 

As always, he grins at the challenge and wades into the men, meeting thrust with parry and jibe with silence. He deals death like it is an old friend (which it is, which it always will be, now). He arcs through battle, as comfortable in his own skin at the song of combat as ever, but he still fights like there is another just behind his shoulder; he tosses a meaty, mustached assailant to the side, expecting a scimitar to slice through the air and kill the foe dead, but there is no one there.

Too late he realizes his mistake, his eyes widening as he pulls his sword along the last robber’s gut. His back goes rigid as he anticipates the blow from behind, as he waits to live and die and live again, but then- 

“Nicoló!”

The whole world snaps back into place at the shout of those three syllables, a dactyl for the ages.

He turns from his assailant (who now lays on the ground, his fascia leaking from his split stomach slowly, the death everything but graceful) to catch sight of a twitching arm that still grips a mace; the image raises bile. His mind reaches an age into the past, his memories slicking with loneliness and absence. He remembers another arm then, that one covered in rusty chainmail and a stained tunic; then a voice, calling to him as it does now, “ _Nicoló, suscita! Nunc!_ ”

His green grey eyes finally track upwards to meet dark ones and he finally wakes after a decade long nightmare. 

He stutters breath through an ill-used windpipe, his entire being gasping, reaching, collapsing (he’s not sure it’s real; after so long looking, perhaps his mind has given him to full _insania_ , too wearied to continue with reality). He thinks, _It must be a dream. It must be a lie. It cannot be-_

His mouth parts, “Josef?”

A blood speckled face with a longer beard than he remembers wildly stares at him, chest heaving and mouth set in a line of guilt, until a deep and lovely voice spills forth a tumult of Zeneize, Arabic, and Latin, “I should not have left you. It was wrong, _hayati_ , I’m so sorry.”

Nicoló (his name has been regained, now that Josef is here; he is a man with a name again, a man with a love to reassure and a wrong to right) dips his head and smiles sadly at the admission. He mumbles with a smile barely tugging at the corner of his lips, “‘ _Namque ipse volens facilisque sequetur_ , _si te fata vocant_.’” 

"What was that?" Josef’s voice cuts into the air, a little hesitant.

Nicoló strides forward, seizing his love's hand so he can hold it right over his heart and bringing their noses so close their mouths brush with every breath, time faltering between them in the face of eternity, “My love, even the poets themselves forgive you and know your soul for what it is. ‘For it will willingly and easily come, if the fates call on you.’”

Josef grins and clasps his fingers harder against Nicoló’s chest, as if he could reach in and pull away the heart nestled inside. If he did, Nicoló would not be upset; he knows that this man would care for it as the ground tends seeds and the earth births life. 

They chase each other, breath in and breath out, an eternity caught between their bodies. Lips and hands, lungs and eyes, skin and soul, what does it matter when they are made of the same, when they are lover and beloved in every sense.

Amidst the meeting of lips to neck, Josef sighs a chuckle and says, “Vergil again, my love?”

Nicoló grumbles lowly and tightens his grip on his (now regained) lover’s curls as punishment for the tease (considering the pleased grunt he receives in turn, it is really a half-hearted admonishment). Nevertheless, he says, “ _Forsan._ Perhaps.”

When they have had their fill of each other, Nicoló looks into sparkling dark eyes and asks, “What brought you back?”

In response, Josef tightens his fingers around Nicoló’s tunic and says, “They all want nothing more than to slaughter each other. Málaga, Alhambra, Jerusalem, Antioch, Tyre, Constantinople, it’s all the same.”

He swallows thickly and rears his head back, almost as if revolting against himself, “You were right, as always. I was a damn fool, _coniunx_. It is not worth it. None of it. Allah does not want death in droves anymore than he wants me to be parted from you. Without you, I am a sky of stars with no moon, an artist with no muse, a life without meaning. I will take my fate from God and lay it at your feet to do with as you will, for you are master of me. You are what I have faith in. You are my home. You are what I chase in my dreams at night and hanker for in the morning. You are the very breath of love. For you, I would walk the breadth of the world. For you, I would write a thousand poems, scribble a million psalms.”

He steps back and bores pleading, dreaming, loving eyes into Nicoló’s own, “For you, I would die and never live again.”

Josef stands there, breathing hard, fingers twitching. Nicoló reaches down to caress the edge of calluses he had nearly forgotten, heart heavy.

At the invitation of touch, the two immortals meet, the world bursting again with color and light, banishing the ghosts of their time apart to regions untold. There will be time to speak of pain and nightmares later; for now, Josef and Nicoló submerge themselves in a blissful dream, never to wake again.

When they break to breathe, Nicoló whispers, “ _Quid putas Maltam?_ What do you think of Malta?”

He dives in again, only to catch Josef’s wide grin between his lips.

….

They leave a letter for Andrea and Quynh (still making their way through the Steppe as far as they know, following the Silk Road and the tides of a dynasty) in a Tunisian wall that they have used for this purpose before; it points the women to salt and sunny time stolen on an island that has changed hands between crusader and crusaded many times over.

They have been to Malta once before, when Arabic fit in Maltese mouths and the Norman rule was still bitter new. Josef and Nicoló were uncomfortable in their immortal bodies and with each other then, the bond of inexplicable life the only thing holding them fast. They had stayed at an inn and worked to bring down a corrupt merchant lord for months; by the end, they shared their first drink together, in a tavern overflowing with merriment. 

It was the first time Nicoló can recall thinking Josef was beautiful. 

Now, Malta has changed and so have they. The Aragonese now hold it, their red and gold coat of arms emblazoned on every surface, the whisper of noble blood and purpose upon every streak of paint while the Maltese inhabitants mill about unperturbed, a force unto themselves.

As the two immortals disembark and take in the colors and rhythms of this old yet new island, Nicoló reaches out his hand, flexing his fingers as he always does, but instead of finding air as he has done for so long, he instead meets skin that is warm and taut. Josef's shoulder knocks against his own as they walk and Nicoló feels moored to something for the first time in an age.

He turns his head to the side, just a little, and finds a wide grin peeking through lovely dark hair. He thinks, _if this is a dream, never let me wake, for he is more beautiful than any reality I’ve ever known_ , and holds tighter, strong enough to shatter bone. But Josef doesn’t mind; he returns the favor with a crushing squeeze of his own. 

….

They wander through the port to a tiny cottage stowed away in a valley at the end of a winding dirt road, a safehouse older than most of the buildings on the island. 

The two stay there for days, weeks even. They relearn every step of each other, every hitch, every gasp. They remember love and they reimagine life. The sheets become useless as skin becomes the only warmth needed. 

But still, there are things to relearn about each other, things that sing of a war fought alone in more ways than one (with each other, with the world, with crusading and Spain and immortality itself).

Sometimes, this truth becomes achingly known.

They will stumble over words in one of the languages they had once written indelibly onto their souls. Or they will mention a moment from their travels apart offhandedly, prompting a thousand yard stare from both of them that howls with the agony of loneliness’ taste. Or they will realize that they have forgotten something about each other (these are the worst times by far; once, Josef had forgotten that Nicoló hated the taste of pomegranate and served him a bowl of seeds, glistening and red. An innocent mistake, one Nicoló forgave and forgot in a moment’s glance, but Josef stepped outside the wooden cottage without a word, his eyes gasping with pain and his limbs held tortuously tense. His love walked around the garden for an hour, every step a storm, until he came back in with dusk and slipped into bed with Nicoló. The next morning, Nicoló finds the pomegranate tree outside cut to bits, the flesh of its fruit strewn about the ground, bruised and weeping).

These are mistakes they should expect, but still, they tear with pain every time. But they try to let the past die as much as it can. Sometimes they are successful; sometimes not.

Nicoló closes his eyes and hopes for something unnameable as Maltese air envelops them. It is a soft breeze; surely they are not at risk of shipwreck on an island as peaceful as this. From behind the darkness of his eyelids, Nicoló reaches out to seize Josef’s fingers and promises not to let go, even if the wind shifts against their favor.

….

One clear and bright morning, Nicoló wakes to a bed empty and cold, Josef gone, likely off painting or writing or sketching, his artist’s mind ever twirling.

Clad only in a tunic and loose breeches, Nicoló rises to watch bees dance outside the window, their stingers sharp and buzz busy. When he glances about the garden, he finds Josef sat amongst tall grass, bathed in the light of early morn. Tan artist’s hands flit across thick paper, charcoal gripped tightly. Josef conjures Maltese bees from nothingness, brought to life by care sweeter than nectar. He casts a scene so beautiful that even from this distance, Nicoló could weep at the sight of it.

Then, when Josef turns the page in his sketchbook, Nicoló’s green grey eyes catch on flushed cheeks, a Roman nose, and thin lips. 

He sees himself, basking in the twilight under an olive tree with berry residue at the corners of his lips. Then, Josef turns the page; again, it is Nicoló, but this time he is sitting on a rock as the sea crashes around him. Then he is standing on a knotted ship's deck, hair wild from the wind. Then, he is wrapped in a candle’s caressing glow, his mouth teasing in the half light. Then, he lies naked among cotton sheets, his chest pockmarked by freckles. Then, he sits at a table, his face marked by anguish and fingers stained by ink.

Josef stops flipping through his sketches to stop at the image, his fingers hesitant as he brings the edge of his nail to trace Nicoló's rendered face. 

Then, Nicoló does weep at the sight.

They both are still, their hearts burning low flames as they recall the memory in tandem. The world whistles with the sound of hearts breaking and wood splintering, the echo of their separation widening like a gaunt gorge.

Nicoló hears a voice say somewhere behind his ear, “‘ _Musa, mihi causas memora…_ ’”

He jolts away from the window at the whisper (but not before he sees the glint of a tear sliding down Josef's skin, the texture of it in the peaceful garden akin to honey creeping down the edge of a jar). He will not let Vergil finish his plea, “‘Muse, recall for me the reasons…’”

Nicoló thrusts open the creaking front door to take a morning walk and banish the doubt and guilt storming inside of him.

He walks along the dirt road, his mind twisting in on itself so endlessly he considers wandering along the seafloor back to Krak des Chevaliers so he can contemplate throwing himself from the high turrets once again. 

Dreams of steep towers abound until he hears heavy footfalls behind him, his neck prickling at the presence before his mind can pull itself from its musings. He whips around, his loose fitting tunic revealing the dagger he keeps tucked into his waistband (a gift from his love, back in Damascus; while Richard the Lionheart traded ice and uneasy peace with Saladin during the festival of Eid, Yusuf pressed a curved and engraved hilt into Nicoló’s hand as he cradled a pot of rare purple dye from Nicoló. The memory is biting in its sweetness and it nips at Nicoló’s mind every time he touches the watered steel dagger). 

Instead of an attacker or a drunk or a robber, he meets strong shoulders and watery, sparkling eyes. His fingers reach up for the hem of his tunic and he pulls it straight, suddenly self-conscious. The tempest in his mind fades to a thudding roar at the presence of his love. 

A soft beard crinkles around a sad smile, “ _Coniunx, deveni me_.”

It is then that Nicoló falls apart, that the storm inside him finally rolls through, his heart leaping from his chest as he unleashes a hurricane of agony. For he has waited so long to hear Josef’s voice speak to him like that, soft and with a beloved’s intonation, “Lover, come to me.”

So he does. 

He falls.

He breathes.

He lives for the feeling of Josef’s skin once again.

Around them, bees swarm and dawn lengthens her light to the heat of full day, but they are cocooned by the enormity of regained love.

They whisper promises to each other, engulfed by their own _mundus_ , the world outside quieting against the surety of forever that has welled between them. The gorge of heartache that had so haunted them now overflows with a river of knowing and known.

Nicoló thinks that the full force of this kind of healing is surely some kind of death on its own, but he doesn’t complain. Josef is stroking his shoulder and mumbling about haircuts and berries and henna tattoos; Nicoló feels the press of something like God close to his heart at the ferocity of their shared destiny.

They walk back to the cottage, hand in hand, fingers twisting for more closeness, more love, more touch. When they finally return, they divest themselves of their clothes once again and fall into softness.

Later, Nicoló thinks, in the calm light of a rested sky, ‘ _dulce est desipere in loco_.’

A hand slides up to grip his neck and clench worn fingertips in newly shortened hair, ‘ _it is sweet to fool around in place_.’

His mind purrs at the imagined tease and he reclines into the touch, back arching and life settling. Horace (the poet who tried to give his love, Vergil, immortality in poetic form, an alignment of history and reality that also makes Nicoló’s sense of destiny keen in the back of his mind) melts into the buzz of trailing kisses, words of Latin faltering against the attraction of Josef’s thrumming limbs.

….

Josef writes, in the cottage. Line upon line of prose and poetry, words that spin tales of inquisitions and men who don’t give a damn, warriors true and cutthroats rampant, love abandoned and reality reneged. Nicoló knows this is how he copes, how his love tells him his regrets and triumphs. He aches, but it is an ache he would surely never replace with the hard itch of loneliness he came to know so well. 

So he listens, intently, endlessly, forlornly. 

Nicoló realizes that, as much as he pines for Vergil's lilting and heroic hexameter, he is more enamored with every breath of Josef's poetry. 

Maybe it's because it is whispered between the slip of salty skin and the hush of shushed apologies, but the syllables cling to him, adorning his ribcage and sparking his heart alight. Embraced by metrical feet and rhymes of love fierce enough to burn down a city, Nicoló feels that if he reached outside their window for the stars, he could pluck them from their perch and offer their brightness to Josef. Then, his love would eat them whole and he would never have to feel the touch of darkness again.

He turns these thoughts over and over in his mind, twists becoming memories and enigmas morphing into poetry. He wonders if he should let their newfound bliss lie and never speak of their separation again, but he is caught still by the memory of their Nicean agony, the wound never disturbed even as it festered. He cannot let that happen again, no matter how much he hurts. This is to be a new beginning for them, one with truth easing out of every pore. 

So, in the veil of a night of summer showers, Nicoló does what he knows he must and presses his mouth to Josef’s ear to whisper the secrets he has learned as they lie in bed.

He tells him of a universe born in the sun’s waning eye, a revelation from Nisus to Euryalus, lovers who fought battles side by side only to die together, separated not even by death. He weaves together a story of a finger brushing a page and an epic line illuminating the truth of a struggle a few hundred years’ long. 

He sings to his love like a muse, poetry that tries to catch the stars and proffer them, so he can meet some of Josef’s lyrical majesty. He tells him of ardor and madness, love and shipwreck, bloody shores and warring countries, Lavinia with red cheeks and Turnus with death given unfairly. The specter of dying Dido visits him so fiercely as he speaks that his tongue falters; he wonders if he will ever be able to read her tale without the sting of death pulling at his throat. 

He tells his love of the other things that he has pulled: the Lots of Vergil and the destiny he came to realize, how Josef was right that they should abandon no one and fight for an inch of rightness in this cruel world.

When he removes his mouth, his secrets finally shared, his lips are wet from tears. Josef’s dark eyes are a torrent of pain and they are so, so bright, they outshine the sun and stars with the full breadth of knowing and understanding caught in their depths. Nicoló sees his own agony and joy reflected back at him in his love’s face, his mouth marked by the faint imprint of loneliness and the edge of his eyelids overflowing with pure _lacrimosa_ , tears.

The sight is too much for Nicoló, his heart already fragile from confession, so he turns green grey eyes to the constellations rising between the storm clouds, the rain clearing enough for the shadows to dispel. 

Beside him, he hears Josef rustle, cotton sheets falling to expose tan skin and Nicoló feels an artist’s hand come to admire the jut of his collarbone. He watches _Aquila_ and _Gemini_ and _Cassiopeia_ and _Ursa Major_ and _Auriga_ blink into existence, stars older than even them that roam the world, deathless as a god’s touch, as deathless as them. The sight comforts him enough that he leans into the brightness of Josef’s touch, his body remembering what it is to be in love.

Then, Nicoló turns his eyes from the night to stare at Josef and traces his fingers down the face of his _coniunx_ , the motion as familiar as breathing.

Dark eyes sparkle with something unnameable as Josef covers Nicoló’s hand with his own. Then, he whispers, “ _Morieris mei._ You will be the death of me.”

Nicoló smiles so quickly that he feels the skin of his lips nearly split, and Josef answers the eagerness with a teasing laugh of his own. Nicoló grasps at his lover’s face so they can lose themselves in each other again.

Suddenly, Josef’s hand strikes out, hot and rough. He reaches for Nicoló’s fingers and whispers, “ _Immo, velut hic._ ” He brings Nicoló’s hand lower, lower, lower, “No, like this.”

Nicoló feels the world burst into color at the intimate whisper and there are the tips of saffron wings dipping into his vision, like angels and goddesses birthing the world anew. It is a cacophony of sensation, always, the edge of a thousand praises behind every touch and the murmur of a thousand loving words behind every glance. 

He has never felt like this before, not even when they sat on a white Nicean beach or danced among Grecian marble or picked Carthiginian hawthorn. He feels freed, his body at rest and his heart full of all and more. He opens his mouth to Josef and learns how to live in this new world made of God and life and death and poetry.

It tastes like lemons, sharp and sweet, bright and unrelenting. 

It tastes like home.

It tastes like love.

It tastes like _immortalitas_.

**Author's Note:**

> I have written another self-indulgent, Latin and history nerd fueled fic! I would like to thank my best friend and my Discord server for their support and love. I would also like to blame the soundtrack of Macbeth (2015) and Reimagined Vivaldi (especially Summer 1) for all my crimes. Pour one out for Jed Kurzel and Max Richter, everybody.
> 
> This fic was envisioned as Joe and Nicky set to the narrative soundtrack of the Aeneid and I hope you enjoyed it! The title is from the Aeneid, of course. It is a quote from Dido (because Rights for Dido), “For who can deceive a lover?”
> 
> The fic takes place from the 1450s to the early 1500s. This is because two events that mark the end of the Crusades happened then: the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the Fall of Granada in 1492. Many at the time called Ferdinand and Isabella's conquest of Granada an ‘evening of the scales’ (which is the worst). After, Spain forced Muslims to convert to Christianity (or suffer the Inquisition’s wrath) and tried to expand into Northern Africa (even managing to capture Tripoli) before being pushed back by the Ottomans. I think Joe follows the war after Granada falls, but becomes disillusioned by the vapid nature of the skirmishes. Nicky follows many of the early Crusades’ worst hits (like Arqa and Jerusalem) as he wanders.
> 
> As far as the other locales and historical choices go, most of them were chosen for a well-researched reason, but ao3 hates how long my notes are, so I'll put an explanation in a comment below if anyone is interested.
> 
> I translated the Latin in text, but here it all is, along with context for the Aeneid references:
> 
> iam, nos omnes et magis sumus- now, we are all and more
> 
> immortalitas- immortality
> 
> Carthago - Carthage (home of the queen Dido who Aeneas falls in love with and then abandons; modern day Tunis is built near the site of ancient Carthage)
> 
> sunt toxica, amans mi- they are poison, my love
> 
> certamen- fight, battle, contest, rivalry
> 
> amore sum viro mirabili- I am in love with a wonderful man
> 
> hic et hic et hic, semper- this and this and this, always
> 
> ede faecem- eat shit
> 
> ‘o miseri, quae tanta insania’- oh miserable ones, what great madness (a quote from Laocoon’s speech to his Trojan brethren wherein he tells them to fear the horse the Greeks had left at their door. For his trouble, he and his sons were strangled by god-sent snakes)
> 
> gratias agamus, Domine, clementia ille tua- we thank thee, Lord, that in thy mercy (a shameless Monty Python reference)
> 
> coniunx- lover, spouse, partner (literally, ‘joined together’ or ‘joined one’)
> 
> suscita! nunc!- wake up! now!
> 
> numera benedictiones- count (your) blessings
> 
> nolite- don’t
> 
> amans mi, cur- my love, why
> 
> non satis est- that is not enough
> 
> arena- sand, desert
> 
> litora- shores
> 
> regina- queen 
> 
> Iris, me solve- Iris, free me (Iris is the goddess of the rainbow and the messenger of Juno; when Dido lays unable to die after her suicide, Iris frees her from her mortal body)
> 
> consors- sharer, companion
> 
> Sortes Vergilianae- the Lots of Vergil (this can be loosely translated as the Destiny of Vergil. It was practiced through the Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance eras. You would ‘pull’ or ‘draw’ a line; Nicky draws 9.184-5)
> 
> ‘dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt, Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?’- do the gods put this fire in our minds, Euryalus, or does each man's mad desire become his own god? (this quote is from a speech by Nisus to his beloved Euryalus before they go out to fight and die for Aeneas. They are, to me, the true Joe and Nicky of mythology)
> 
> ‘namque ipse volens facilisque sequetur, si te fata vocant’- for it will willingly and easily come, if the fates call on you (when Aeneas asks the Sibyl how to enter the underworld, she tells him he will need a golden bough and that it will only let itself be taken if the fates demand it. Joe is amused and confused at the reference because he was essentially called a stick)
> 
> forsan- perhaps
> 
> quid putas Maltam?- what do you think of Malta?
> 
> ‘Musa, mihi causas memora…’- Muse, recall for me the reasons… (this is Vergil’s call for a Muse’s guidance at the start of the epic)
> 
> coniunx, deveni me- lover, come to me
> 
> mundus- world, heavens
> 
> ‘dulce est desipere in loco’- it is sweet to fool around in place (in loco is an innuendo; it means both place and genitals. This is a quote from Horace, fellow poet and lover of Vergil in a poem written about the Aeneid author. They were quite cute, actually)
> 
> lacrimosa- tears
> 
> morieris mei- you will be the death of me
> 
> immo, velut hic- no, like this


End file.
